Catching up with comic book legend Joe Kubert

Two things I’m very happy to report about Joe Kubert: The comic book legend is still very much involved in the business and he’s still very much at the top of his game.

I recently had the pleasure and privilege of interviewing Kubert for his work on “Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965,” a graphic novel/war journal he wrote and illustrated about a brief but harrowing Vietnam battle. And if you know anything about Sgt. Rock, then you know Kubert is the perfect talent to bring such a harrowing war story to the page. Especially a true war story.

I’ll link to my article when it hits mySA. (UPDATE: Here it is.) In the meantime, hit the jump for more from Kubert that didn’t make the print story, including his plans to revisit Hawkman.

If you’ve never heard of Kubert, think of him as a face you’d find on the Mount Rushmore of comic book forefathers.

Born in 1926, Kubert has had a hand or pencil in comics every since he was an 11-year-old apprentice at Harry “A” Chesler’s comic book production house. In his more than 60 years in the field, Kubert has crafted numerous comic tales featuring Tarzan, Hawkman, Superman, Batman and of course Sgt. Rock.

Kubert has also helped guide aspiring comic talents at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, New Jersey. Such talents include his sons Adam and Andy Kubert, who’ve drawn their share of Marvel Comics’ characters and now mostly illustrate the heroes of DC Comics.

Kubert recently worked with Adam on a Sgt. Rock story for DC’s “Wednesday Comics,” so you could say the elder talent has had war comics on the brain of late. But Kubert stresses working on “Dong Xoai” had less to do with the setting and more to do with a compelling story.

“I select the kind of thing that I want to do based on the kind of thing that I think is an interesting story to read rather than the genre,” Kubert says. “The genre itself is completely and totally unimportant to me.”

And whether the principals in that genre wear spandex or combat fatigues, Kubert stresses the importance of doing your homework. That is, paying as much attention to the world these heroes fight in as to the heroes themselves.

“We mostly in the comic book business are dealing with people in situations that go beyond imagination,” Kubert says. “But the only way I think that what we do can be acceptable is that the backgrounds in which these actions take place have to be absolutely credible, believable. You can place a giant 15 foot high and if the illustration shows it’s taking place in the city and that city looks real, [then] the general public, the person looking at this picture will accept that fact that this guy realty exists because the background looks so real.”

(DC Comics)

You certainly get a sense of that in “Dong Xoai,” from the dense bush surrounding the battleground to the scorched earth at ground zero. Kubert’s scratchy pencils (and they are just that — “a pencil and a good eraser,” Kubert says) really put you into the scene, not just around it.

“If I can do a scene that is highly emotional or perhaps involves something physical going on — and if I can picture that in such a way that the viewer or the reader adds to it rather than seeing everything as if it’s a schematic, I think then the reader becomes part of what’s happening on the paper,” Kubert says.

After “Dong Xoai,” Kubert fans can immerse themselves into a series of DC anthology books that should unfold next year.

Why the wait? “I’ll be doing six issues,” Kubert says. “The first won’t come out until I have at least four in the drawer.”

Which means we’ll have to wait just a bit longer for “The Redeemer,” Kubert’s tale of nigh-Biblical proportions which was first teased more than 20 years ago.

As Cosmic Teams explains, the book “hinged on the concept of reincarnation and featured a man named Torkan in a succession of time periods — from the age of the caveman to the future of 2557 A.D. In each of his lives, Torkan would be unaware that a higher power had selected him to be the Redeemer. Time and again, he would be tempted by the forces of the Infernal One, recalling his past only in flashes of deja vu.”

Kubert also has a 22-page Hawkman story for the anthology on the way which he wrote and illustrated. (Insert SQEEE! here.) Kubert didn’t say too much about the Hawkman tale, other than he thinks he’s “put kind of a new take” on the tough Thanagrian.

“That was a big kick for me,” Kubert says.

Which pretty much sums up my interview experience with Joe Kubert. Again, what a treat.